Is a pomegranate split
A waterfall pouring in.
Each half lifts
Drifts out to sea,
Eaten clean as January boats
By frost and salt.
One will sink, one go free:
Withered fruit-husk without salt
Or soul. Could be you
And could be me, watching January waves
Erupt like whales and thrones and tractors:
Stones clash back into their places.
You wait for a boat to come
And snatch you from love’s pandemonium
Of humping tide and screeching stones.
But what shipwrecked you there?
Want to know, and cease to wonder:
The boat lurches into seas of danger
Waves turning phosphorous, turn fire:
Rowers begin work, and you not with them
When the numbness in you burns
Because you do not want to go, or stay.
Pomegranate is a far-off fruit
Scattered seeds fulfil no circle.
Love cannot kill
A broken heart, nor mend it.
The sea defends its dead
And those born from it,
Believes in broken hearts
Burns when it boils so.
No boat can stay, must fall apart
Floating through the open heart,
Like fruit bursting
At the shock of moonless water,
And two more hearts pulled in to slaughter.
NAKED
Naked, naked, I never see you naked
As if to be naked is to tell lies
With the body that you show –
Cover it and keep the truth.
Hide naked, keep it close
You never let me see you naked
Unless half so by accident or tease.
Hide it carefully: those lies are yours,
Not mine, speak them loudly if they burn.
Belong to someone else, not mine.
I see you naked through them,
Through love, naked beyond the truth
That will not let you see yourself.
Keep your body for someone else:
The lies that hide you are less sure
Than the truth that blinds me.
GHOSTS: WHAT JASON SAID TO MEDEA
It is time to part, before murder is done.
We have robbed each other of all we had,
Eaten bitter herbs of battleground and kitchen
And soaked our souls in them,
Digested the gall of trust so cannot give it back
In that pure state it was before:
Consumed ourselves by ignoble hatred.
So let us part like ghosts
And promise not to haunt each other –
Or make ghosts of others.
HUNGER
I haven’t found my hunger yet. When will I know
The hunger to eat these walls away?
The smallest creature visible to the eye
Ran the pallid whiteness up this page
And when I crushed it, hungry at its freedom,
I found a tiny spider made of brick.
It had lived on brick, the bright red dust of brick
That filled its dust-dot of a body and even the speck
Of legs it ran upon. Its life was fed by dust,
The dust of bricks, and it had slaked its hunger
On bricks, no question asked or thought of,
Eating through walls was its life, its vital hunger
For the walls it ate through, even at times
Without hunger. It was so realized
I crushed it, a reddish smear
On the page to remind me
Of the hunger that I know about at last.
HEPHZIBAH
Why don’t I write or speak the name?
No light at Hephzibah’s window,
So do not use ‘love’ in vain
Nor easily at this turn of the game.
Her name ignites the wind, breeds
Smoke in the snow of the heart
Gluttons the marrow as I watch
The bombed space
Phosphorized to blindness.
You cannot answer letters or my speeches,
A different man when salt burns
Till there is no more light.
Signals change before the gale
Wipes all traffic out.
Cogs and linchpins tattoo Hephzibah
So I can’t forget your name, or use it,
But continually hear magic syllables
Shriller than my curse
As I speed through
White headlights flooding the world.
FULL MOON’S TONGUE
Over Earls Court chimneypots,
And he circled slowly
Round the square to find
A suitable parking place –
She said: ‘Let’s go away together.’
‘Keep clear,’ he said. ‘You’d better not.
I’ll take you, but watch out,
For I will bring you back
If at all,
In two pieces.’
She said: ‘I’ll never want to come back
If I go away with you.’
‘They all do,’ he said.
‘I’ll bring you back in two pieces
And you’ll live like that forever
And never join them up again.’
‘How cruel,’ she said, seeing what he meant.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘To take you apart completely
From yourself and make two separate pieces
Might be the one sure way of fixing
A whole person out of you –
Some do, some don’t.’
He was exceptionally nonchalant.
‘I’m not sure now,’ she said,
Screaming suddenly: ‘You bastard!
Let me get out, I want to walk.’
He stopped the car
But could not park it,
Someone with a similar problem
Was hooting him to move,
So she jumped free and walked away
Leaving him bewildered,
And in at least two pieces.
You talk too much,
Said one piece to another.
SILENCE AND STILLNESS
Silence and stillness
Are most prized in a whirlwind.
Panic is being caught
Between millstones of stillness –
Feel the bones of the body
Living out the heart’s pain.
The whirlwind will penetrate
The stockade of a gaze erected
That nothing can break through,
While waiting for the force
That will pull you into the body
And draw all pain away.
A lawn grows in the palm of one hand:
Trees in the other combust
To chase worms out.
Nothing can soothe the battered soul,
But love cauterizes madness.
SMILE
Can’t get him out –
Sits right in the fireplace
Curled up tight
Olive logs send red flames
Feeling the chimney spout.
Cold and safe, legs indrawn,
Wan smile, squats in his fireplace,
Irons cold, hair neat
Away and safe unless
A crowbar can prise him whimpering free.
He smiles wanly because no one has.
If and when he would be normal,
A dead man on the street, smiles
In a mirror no one can smash:
A moonless grimace of victory,
Insane as the sun
That cleanses better than any fire
Or his prison it once burned in.
CHAIN
&nbs
p; The chain is weakest at its strongest point:
The strong link by its heart helps weaker parts,
And so weak links grow tauter than they should.
Thus, taking too much strength
The whole chain crumbles
Broken at both weak and stronger points.
Water breaks the strongest chain
When a stormtide drags the ship away.
Power changes all equations –
The strongest link a strand of hair,
And weakest at its strongest point
Shares its heart with weaker hearts.
GULF OF BOTHNIA – ON THE WAY TO RUSSIA
Midnight aches at the length of life
The endless day
Blocking the porthole-elbow of Bothnia:
One grand eye lit in twelve o’clock yellow,
Turquoise and carmine sun
A wound gouged by the night-dragon
Not yet asleep.
Day bleeds to death
Sea close enough to dip
The pen and write in.
No midsummer howitzer can give
A morphine blast and send the sun
To whatever will rise up at dawn for me.
Space and midnight fill all emptiness,
As lost love bleeds acidic dreams
Into the solvent sea:
Red like a Roman bath.
EURASIAN JETNOTE
Frontiers meet over steppe and meadow
At burial mound, salt waste or winter hut,
Beyond danubes and caspians
Where sturgeon breed by reed and barge-hull–
But wood outlives
Asia or Europe, love shaped by heart-torn
Internal bleeding of the stricken forest.
Wood dies, and is born again.
IRKUTSK
In Irkutsk a swastika was scrawled
On a wall so I took my handkerchief
And spat and rubbed
But it was tough chalk
Wondering why those Red pedestrians
Didn’t grind it off.
I’d done the same in London
Walking to the Tube
And missing the train quite often,
But here it was ineradicable Russian chalk
Though I chafed it to the barest shadow,
No one taking notice on their walk
Down Karl Marx Street. I strolled
Away to let them keep it.
Apart from scraping out a concave mark
The crippled cross would stay forever,
And anyway why should I get arrested
For damaging The People’s Property?
BAIKAL LAKE-DUSK
Black ice breaking without sound or reason:
Water below moves its shoulders
Like a giant craving to see snow.
Ninety-degree cold preserves mosquito eggs
As the fist of winter
Pulls into the sun’s mittens.
The domed sun touches the horizon,
A totem in the lake sinking
Till its feet touch bottom and reach fire.
SHAMAN AT LISTVYANKA
Stopped his cart
Refused food
Shook tin brass skulls copper
Turned to the sun
And pressed a horseshoe to his eyes
Spun a waterspout of words
Grave toes patterning the soil
Under a tree clothed all in green,
Chews beansprouts from his crown
Spins to pipe dance
Head between land and sky
Hand five candle-fingers
Fuelled by the gutters of his stomach.
Spins to music
Stick legs strut
In wide skin trousers:
Shouting melts and planctifies
Fisherboats and floating logs:
Recites alone and long
On Baikal fish and stork in one:
Sea that threatens fire-spiders
Copperbacks and claws –
Creep from the rimline lake
Feet to feel and lips to taste,
Have no heart but swarm
To eat from him and die of it –
As brass-hooved breakers
Break and draw them back
And he weaving
Over sand to green land
Melting and metalling
In blacksmith power.
Horses birds and torches flee
From tundra magic keening,
Flesh of man flying
Skinflags unfurling
In a merciless slipstream to the sun.
Drop, hear drums
Rend on the flight,
He so far within
Sly, taciturn and a bully when normal
Knowing he must keep that self out
Or power goes,
Be an old man forever
Carved in rock by the fire
After the last telling.
TOASTING
Drink, blackout, gutter-bout
Kick back nine swills of vodka
That put an iron band around
Thorned skullcap and fire
Of words toasting Life
Peace, Town or Cousin.
Bottles, heaped grub, dead towers in tabletown:
Wine descends in light and colour
As if the Devil had a straw stuck there
Greedily drawing liquid in
As consciousness draws out.
RAILWAY STATION
Death is the apotheosis of the Bourgeois Ethic.
Tolstoy when he felt it coming on
Left his family and set out for Jerusalem.
Death shared its railway station:
He in a coma heard trains banging
Where Anna violated life.
The fourth bell drowned his final wrath.
The Bolsheviks renamed the station after him
Instead of Bourgeois Death.
RIDE IT OUT
Ride it out, ride it,
Ride out this mare of sleeplessness
Galloping above the traffic roar
Of Gorki Street,
Weaving between Red stars
And the grind of cleaning wagons.
Today all Moscow was in mourning
Because there’s no queue at Lenin’s tomb.
I told them but they wouldn’t believe me.
Ride out this beast who won’t let me sleep,
Drags me up great Gorki Street
And into Pushkin Square,
Leningrad a rose on the horizon
Ringed by blood and water –
Pull up the blankets
And be small for a few hours of the night.
THE POET
The poet sings his poems on a bridge
A bridge open to horizontal rain
And the steely nudge of lightning,
Or icy moths that bring slow death
Croon him to sleep by snow-wings touching his eyes.
Through this he sings
No people coming close to watch when the snow
Melts and elemental water forces smash
Between cliff and rock under his swaying bridge.
When the water thins, his sweat-drops burst
On scorching rocks like sparks from a flower pod;
Through all this he sits and sings his poems
To those vague crowds on either bank
He cannot make out or consider
With such short sight, for after the first applauded
Poem he let his glasses smash into the rocks below.
The bridge belongs to him, his only property,
Grows no food, supports no houses –
Cheap to buy with the first mediocre poems.
It spans a river that divides two territories –
He knew it and made no mistake:
Today he faces one and tomorrow the other
But from blurred eyes they look the same to him:
Green fields and red-roofed houses
Rising to mountains where wars can be fought
Without a bitter end being reached –
The same on either side.
He does not write a poem every day
But each pet territory takes its turn
To hear his words in one set language burn
And drive them back from each other.
In any rash attack they cannot cross his bridge
But broach the river and ravine
Down at the estuary or far upstream.
He listens to the stunning bloodrush of their arms
And shakes his head, never grows older
As he bends to his paper which one side or the other
Contrives to set, with food, by his hands’ reach.
Sometimes sly messengers approach at night
Suggesting he writes and then recites
Upon some momentary theme
To suit one side and damn the other,
At which he nods, tells jokes and riddles
Agrees to everything and promises
That for them he’ll tear the world apart
With his great reading.
He stays young, ignoring all requests and prophecies,
But his bridge grows old, the beams and ropes brittle,
And some night alien figures
In a half-circle at each dim bridgehead
Brandish knives and axes. Lanterns flash,
Blades and points spark like spinning moons
Gathering as he puts away pens and parchment,
Closes his eyes, and does not wake for a week,
Knowing he will once more dream
The familiar childhood dream
Of falling down the sheer side of the world
And never wake up.
But he owns and dominates his bridge.
It is his bread and soul and only song –
And if the people do not like it, they can cut him free.
LEFT AS A DESERT
Left as a desert:
Deserted by one great experience
That pulled its teeth and shackles out
And left me as a desert
Under which bones are buried
Over which the sand drifts.
Seven years gone like laden camels:
The gravel and the wind
Is piling this vast desert up
To one sky and one colour
And sky reflecting desert shapes.
The solitary heart lurks on the off-chance
That rain clouds will come and fertilize
The great experience that made this desert.
LOVE IN THE ENVIRONS OF VORONEZH